I find it makes life easier to segregate my Wine apps, so first steps were:

export WINEPREFIX=/usr/local/civ
winecfg

There, I set Wine to also consider /usr/local/civ to be where my My Documents folder was, so the game would create its "My Games" folder there instead of under my real Linux home directory.

Wine 1.1.22. It failed with Wine 1.1.23, the current development release.
Used winetricks to install d3dx9 and msxml3
Needed this to get around a stupid sound bug:

mkdir -pv $HOME/.kde/socket-$HOSTNAME

Then just running

wine setup.exe

on the file at the top level of the DVD did the rest. I selected "custom install" so I could set a less long, obnoxious installation path than the default. I installed the just-released Beyond the Sword 3.19 patch.

I put Blue Marble on top of that, and ran vanilla Civ, Warlords, Beyond the Sword, and Colonization once each to create the appropriate folders under My Games, and to set the graphics and audio options to my preferences.

I edited each of the CivilizationIV.ini files in their respective directories under the installation directories to set NoIntroMovie = 1 and EnableVoice = 0. (The first is just by preference; the intro movies worked fine. The default EnableVoice = 1 resulted in a warning under Warlords, but not the others. Strange.) It didn't work to set these just in the CivilizationIV.ini files under My Games, which I would have thought was the point.

Finally, I backed up the results so I won't have to do all that again when I inevitably screw something up while playing with mods.

The startup scripts are simply like this:

#!/bin/bash
WINEPREFIX=/usr/local/civ 
/usr/bin/wine /usr/local/civ/drive_c/Program\ Files/civ4complete/Civilization4.exe $@

Everything but a few cosmetic details works. Unit health bars don't, city progress bars on the main map don't (this can be ameliorated by requesting detailed city info in the options), the cursor animation doesn't work, so it doesn't turn into a little spinning globe when you're waiting. So far as I can tell, everything else works. (And my words are backed by a Holy Roman spaceship at Alpha Centauri.)

irb(main):021:0> '\\' + 'x'
=> "\\x"
irb(main):022:0> "x".gsub("x",'\\' + 'x')
=> "\\x"
irb(main):023:0> '\\' + '&'
=> "\\&"
irb(main):024:0> "&".gsub("&",'\\' + '&')
=> "&"

I remembered a project to let you use a Palm in its cradle as an LCD display. PalmOrb has been orphaned since 2005, and, as of the last version, indicates you’re on your own with USB Palms (which are the only ones I have left.) It actually worked decently with LCD4Linux. But it only left you with a tiny block of text, and it was harder than I’d like to customize the output.

So I tried simply running ptelnet, a Palm telnet app, to make a serial connection, and running a script that wrote to /dev/pilot (I had the visor module loaded), clearing the screen every minute (with VT100 escape codes) and sending status info.

It works pretty well, but the text is tiny, with no way to change the size. Anyone know of an alternative to ptelnet to just receive data from the serial connection and display it, that allows you to change fonts?

/usr/local/bin/editor2 is:
#!/bin/bash
EMACS=/usr/bin/emacs
EMACSCLIENT=/usr/bin/emacsclient
SOCKET=/tmp/emacs`id -u`/server

$EMACS --daemon

count=25

while [ $[ count-- ] -gt 0 ]; do
if [ -e $SOCKET ] && [ ! (lsof $SOCKET &> /dev/null) ]; then
$EMACSCLIENT -c "$*"
break
fi
sleep .2
done

Among the advantages here over the old one:

emacs --daemon is only run if emacsclient can't find a socket, as opposed to emacsclient encountering any error

The old one slept for 1 second after launching the daemon. This was occasionally too short, but usually too long. This one checks for the socket five times a second, and gives up after five seconds. (There are imaginable race conditions that could give undesirable results, but I don't expect to ever actually encounter them.)

#!/bin/bash
if [ -z $DISPLAY ] ; then
OPT="-t"
else
OPT="-c"
fi

if [ -z "$*" ]; then
OPT="$OPT -e (raise-frame)"
else
OPT="$OPT $@"
fi
emacsclient $OPT 2>/dev/null || (
(emacs --daemon)
sleep 1
emacsclient $OPT)

I have that as /usr/local/bin/editor. To stop emacs nicely, and get prompted to save unfinished business, I have another script with:

/usr/local/bin/editor -e '(save-buffers-kill-emacs)'

Looking into alternatives, I found that the GTK library includes vte, a terminal emulator widget that a bunch of terminal emulators use. And they all look good, but had a drawback I couldn’t live with: none of the ones I tried recognized my Meta-keys, which I’ve grown used to using for command-line editing in my shell.

vte, along with the Ruby GTK bindings, makes life so easy, I just rolled my own. This is just the Ruby vte demo program that comes with the bindings with a couple of lines added to handle Meta-keys.

require "vte"

window = Gtk::Window.new("Terminal sample")
window.signal_connect("destroy"){Gtk.main_quit}

vte = Vte::Terminal.new
vte.set_font("DejaVu Sans Mono 16", Vte::TerminalAntiAlias::FORCE_ENABLE)

Gtk.key_snooper_install {|t, e| 
  vte.feed_child("\e")  if e.state.meta_mask? and e.event_type == Gdk::Event::KEY_PRESS
}

vte.signal_connect("child-exited") do |widget|
  Gtk.main_quit
end
vte.signal_connect("window-title-changed") do |widget|
  window.title = vte.window_title
end
vte.fork_command
window.add(vte)
window.show_all

Gtk.main

sudo apt-get install netselect
wget --no-check-certificate -O mirrors https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archivemirrors
sudo netselect -v -s 5 $(perl -F'"' -ane 'print "$F[1] " if (/United States/ .. /highlighted/) && /http/' mirrors)

That gives the top 5 (from fastest to slowest) in the US using http. It should be reasonably clear how to adjust the number returned, the country, or the protocol (which could be 'ftp' or 'rsync'.) It erroneously considers canonical.com a mirror in Viet Nam (it fails to find the end correctly for the last country in the list), but there's only one mirror in Viet Nam, and this is a quick hack, so I can live with that.

It makes me grumpy when applications depend on installing huge portions of Gnome or KDE. So I was never thrilled with the PDF viewer choices.

ghostview and xpdf are good tools, but ugly, and they don't natively talk to CUPS print servers. evince and kpdf want to install huge portions of Gnome and KDE, respectively. I haven't tried acroread, but I scramble for alternative's to Adobe's bloated reader in Windows, so I thought I'd spare myself.

So I was happy to find epdfview, which shares some of evince's dependencies on graphics libraries without the gratuitous dependencies.

But there was a catch: Ubuntu 8.04's binary package doesn't include CUPS support, for no apparent reason (there's already a bug filed.) The good news is that you can build it yourself.

So I'm now a happy viewer and printer of PDFs while still avoiding having dbus, gamin, bonobo, etc., installed.

Ubuntu had inherited from Debian a problem whereby network interfaces' names can be inconsistent from one reboot to the next. The installer identified my mobo's wired network interface as eth1. On rebooting, the OS decided it was eth2, but /etc/network/interfaces had been configured to use the (now non-existent) eth1, hence no network.

In days' past, I've used /etc/iftab to ensure it didn't recur, but, apparently, as of Gutsy, this approach is deprecated, and the shiny new method is to use udev.

I then spent much time bashing my head against trying to arrange to boot into an encrypted root filesystem within an LVM2 logical volume on an encrypted LUKS partition, similar to this but using yaird to create the boot image. This is something I've done in the current Ubuntu release, Feisty. But I ran into a couple of bugs in Gutsy's yaird package. (The trivial one also existed in Feisty, but I didn't report it then.)

It'd be nice if Ubuntu offered an encrypted root installation option like Debian Etch, but I'd probably want enough things different from any set of options offered to end up doing it manually anyway.

I'm pretty sure I know how to fix the problem now. But I haven't had the time to take another crack at it, so my first look has been stalled here.

Maybe when I'm done, I'll write yet another encrypted root howto.

Oh well. The Weecam's off to the Alameda County Computer Resource Center, and I'll give iwrandom a try. (But a webcam in the dark is so much cooler, drat it.)

So far as I can read on the Interwebs, most people facing this install rubygems as root, and do their subsequent gem installs as root, letting them write wherever in the filesystem they like.

That makes me queasy. I don't want to mix two package systems in the same environment.

So here's how I installed ruby/rubygems/rails in Ubuntu 7.04, with all gems under /usr/local.

Following the ruby1.8 package's own instructions for a full Ruby 1.8 distribution:

sudo apt-get install ruby1.8 ruby1.8-dev ri1.8 rdoc1.8 irb1.8 ruby1.8-elisp ruby1.8-examples libdbm-ruby1.8 libgdbm-ruby1.8 libtcltk-ruby1.8 libopenssl-ruby1.8 libreadline-ruby1.8

I assign ownership of /usr/local and everything under it to the admin group, and make /usr/local and its subdirectories group-writable (per Ubuntu's defaults, my primary login, which I created during installation, is a member of the admin group.)

sudo chown -R root:admin /usr/local 
sudo chmod 775 /usr/local /usr/local/*

I get and install rubygems.

mkdir /usr/local/lib/rubygems
export GEM_HOME=/usr/local/lib/rubygems
cd /usr/local/src
# as of this writing, the latest rubygems from http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=126
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/20989/rubygems-0.9.4.tgz
tar xzf rubygems-0.9.4.tgz
cd rubygems-0.9.4
ruby setup.rb config --prefix=/usr/local
ruby setup.rb setup
ruby setup.rb install

I add the following to my .bashrc, but you'll want them in any environment using gems. With multiple users on a system, you might want to put this in /etc/bash.bashrc.

export GEM_HOME=/usr/local/lib/rubygems
export RUBYLIB=/usr/local/site_ruby/1.8
export RUBYOPT=rubygems
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/lib/rubygems/bin

The grand finale:

source .bashrc # or wherever you put them
gem install rails --include-dependencies

It's that easy!

References:

• Installing Rails and Mongrel on a Shared Host
• Ruby on Rails on Debian
• RubyGems User Guide, Ch. 3

I asked my email-pal: "UNIX or Windoze?". He replied "UNIX". I said "Ah...me too!".

I asked my email-pal: "Linux or AIX?". He said "Linux, of course". I said "Me too".

I asked him: "Emacs or vi". He replied "Emacs". I said "Me too. Small world."

I asked him: "GNU Emacs or XEmacs?", and he said "GNU Emacs". I said "oh, me too."

I asked him "GNU Emacs 19 or GNU Emacs 20"? and he said "GNU Emacs 19". I said "oh, me too."

I asked him, "GNU Emacs 19.29 or GNU Emacs 19.34", and he replied "GNU Emacs 19.29". I said "DIE YOU OBSOLETE NOGOOD SOCIALLY MALADJUSTED CELIBATE COMMIE FASCIST DORK!", and never emailed him again.

Ubuntu Linux 7.04 beta, GNU Emacs 23.0.0.1 alpha, with Xft support. But I'm reformed -- any Linux or BSD distro and Emacs flavor is OK by me. (Everyone else can DIE!)

The text boxes on the edit entry page are tiny little things, because mt-static/styles.css is missing an entry for the full-width class. This can be fixed by putting this in your mt-static/user_styles.css:

And for Bruce Schneier, SHA-1 is merely a compression algorithm.